Майк Ланкастер - Human.4

Except that wasn’t what happened.

Of course it wasn’t.

That’s just silly storybook stuff.

When Danny clicked his fingers, nothing happened.

We were in the barn; Danny was still shining inside his bioluminescent aura; and Mr Peterson, Lilly, Kate and I were still very much zero-point-four.

It was in the silence following the click that things happened.

Small things.

Human things.

The only things we had left.

Lilly started to cry—huge, body-wracking sobs and fat tears—and Kate O’Donnell put a protective arm around her. I just stood, watching dust motes swirling in the air of the barn and tried to understand this new world.

Without falling apart.

Danny stood there, watching us.

Watching us all deal with it as best we could.

He took no pleasure from the sight, I’m pretty sure of that, but looked on with a cold, alien detachment that made me wonder if the 1.0 were going to be as perfect as Danny seemed to think.

Maybe he wasn’t even really listening. Perhaps the alien code was bedding down, performing last-minute tweaks.

I realized that he was losing interest in us—he was looking more and more like he needed to be somewhere else.

I had a few last questions for Danny.

Danny the boy magician, encased in his impossible halo of bone-fueled light.

I asked Danny what he was missing out, what he wasn’t telling us.

He looked a little baffled.

Maybe a little hurt, although perhaps that’s just me, trying to see him as my friend, rather than the alien thing he had become.

"That list of people who skipped the upgrade," I said. "You said it was contained in a ReadMe file. What is that?"

"It seems to be installation information," he said. "Although for whom, and why, I do not know. I’m sure it will auto-delete when the update is complete."

"What else does it say?" I asked him.

Danny looked surprised that it interested me, but then he shrugged and started reeling off a bunch of jargon and tech-stuff in a robotic voice before trailing off into silence.

Most of it I didn’t understand, so most of it I don’t remember.

But I do remember three things he said about halfway through his recitation.

Danny said, "Fixed system slowdown when individual units are put to sleep, allowing greater access to unconscious processing activity."

And he said, "Tightened encrypted storage parameters to comply with new guidelines."

And then he said, "Completely reworked user interface makes access of data easier and faster."

"What does that mean?" I asked, when he was finished.

Danny shook his head.

"I’m sure you’ll figure it out," he said. "You do realize that this upgrade was necessary, don’t you, Kyle? The human race had become a danger to itself, to the planet."

"Well, why did they leave us here?" I asked. "Why didn’t they just get that vestigivore thing to wipe us all out?"

Danny smiled a cryptic smile.

"That wouldn’t be anywhere near so entertaining, would it now? Think of the future generations," he said.

I thought he was joking.

"I’d say, “I’ll be seeing you,”" Danny said. "Except I won’t, of course."

Just before he turned for the door, he looked at me and said, "Annette says “Hi”."

I stared back at him.

"She says it was really sweet of you," he said. "Trying to save her, and all."

I could sense Kate O’Donnell’s stony glare and felt my cheeks redden.

"Now she wants to try to do the same for you," Danny said, that red aura fading. "Meet her up at the Naylor silos and you can end all of this now."

Then he turned and left.

Didn’t look back.

A taste of things to come.

"What did he mean?" Kate O’Donnell demanded. "About the silos, and Annette and trying to save her?"

We were sitting on bales of straw, and it was pretty much pitch black outside.

I felt the words knot up on the tip of my tongue.

"WELL?" she prompted. "Do you have something to tell us?"

Lilly’s hand sought mine and I held on to it tightly as I told Kate and Rodney Peterson about what had really happened when we separated on the Crowley Road.

Kate was furious.

"And you didn’t think that this might be a piece of information that we would want to know?" she said incredulously. "You selfish, stupid—"

"Steady on, Kate," Mr Peterson said calmly. "They were only—"

"ONLY WHAT?" she demanded. "Only keeping things from us? Only telling us lies? Only preventing us from making the most important decision of our life?"

"There’s no decision to make," Mr Peterson said. "I’m not going to volunteer to become one of those… things ."

There was another silence. A big empty space where nothing was said, but so much was revealed.

It was Mr Peterson that broke it.

"Surely you’re not actually considering it?" he asked, his voice shocked.

"I don’t know," Kate said at last. "It might not be so bad."

"I saw them," Mr Peterson said firmly. "I saw them for what they really are. I can tell you this with absolute certainty: they are not the same as us . Not even close. I saw them and I do not want to be one of them. I’m happy being who I am."

Kate let out a cruel bark of laughter.

"A postman and part-time ventriloquist?" she said derisively. "A bad ventriloquist, at that."

Mr Peterson looked at her, not with anger, but with humor.

"I guess that is who and what I appear to be," he said. "But that doesn’t mean it’s all I am, or the way it has always been. For now, being a postman is good, honest work. And it makes me happy. Not everyone has to fly high to prove they exist; some of us are perfectly happy flying low and enjoying the view.

"I’ll never be rich, but that doesn’t matter to me. Before I came to Millgrove I had a good job, a devoted wife and a beautiful little boy. But leukemia stole my son from me, and everything else just crumbled away. Iain was four when he became ill, and Mr Peebles was just something silly I made to put a smile on his face. Most of the joke was how bad I was. But when he was laughing he forgot the pain, and that was better than doing nothing and watching him slip away.

"So, yes, I’m a terrible ventriloquist, but it used to make Iain laugh. And so once a year I get Mr Peebles out of the cupboard and I stand in front of the village and I invite everyone to laugh. Not with me: but at me. Hearing other kids laughing makes me think, just for a second, that he’s still here. Here in the world. Not a cold, dead thing in the ground.

"I don’t want to be upgraded. I don’t want to become one of those things. I want to remember my son. If you want to give up, become one of them because it’s easier, then go ahead. But difficult is good. It’s what makes us human."

"I’m sorry," Kate said quietly. "I’m just scared. More scared than I have ever been."

"Scared is something," Mr Peterson said.

We sat there in silence, letting it all sink in.

We were all scared, but who wouldn’t be?

If what Danny said was true—and I for one no longer had any doubts—then we no longer existed.

We were 0.4.

Irrelevant.

NOTE

There is a long pause here, followed by an odd acoustic glitch, which Lucas Pauley identifies as the tape being manually stopped. Then there is an odd snatch of music in which the words "sirens are howling" can be (just about) discerned.

Ella Benison notes a dramatic change between the tape stopping and being restarted: "The tone of Kyle Straker’s voice has changed, and is more like the struggling narrative voice we saw during the first passage of the first tape. To me it seems obvious that Kyle needs time to settle back into his narrative flow because the time that has passed from switching off the tape to switching it back on is considerable."